Looking up down east.

• Author: Peek, Charlie
• Position: Business magnate C. Felix Harvey III's plan to build air-cargo complex in Lenoir, North Carolina - Includes related article on Harvey's son-in law John O. McNairy

Felix Harvey, whose family fortune came from the land, wants Eastern North Carolina to look farther afield for prosperity -- a prospect that furrows some farmers' brows.

At this busy roadside stand near the edge of Kinston, the tall produce peddler furtively presses a few extra peaches into the hands of a matron of one of Durham's most powerful families. C. Felix Harvey III sells fruit with the same intensity he once used to squeeze $38 million from International Telephone & Telegraph in a deal over an insurance company.

"That's a finesse game," he says of the corporate board room. "You've got to know when to walk, when to trot, when to run and when to sit. Here, it's all trotting and running."

From mid-June when the first peaches ripen until late July when only tired watermelons are left, the fruit stand is unquestionably a Harvey enterprise, though not an official corporate shoot of L. Harvey and Sons, the 121-year-old thicket of interlocked companies rambling like kudzu across Lenoir County and the surrounding plain of Eastern North Carolina. Include the farms, the John Deere dealerships, a savings and loan and a land-clearing company, and you have an operation with combined annual sales of $148 million. The fruit stand is Felix Harvey's way of keeping in touch -- with the land from which the Harvey fortune sprang, with city folks who stop to renew their acquaintance, with the farmers who made his family's businesses successful.

In Lenoir County, it's difficult if not downright impossible for a serious farmer to operate without buying something from a Harvey. It has been that way for decades. William Davis, the owner of a large tobacco warehouse in Kinston, says, "You've always been able to get whatever equipment you need from Harvey, from a John Deere tractor to a bag of nails."

For four generations now, as farmers carried their goods to market, they carried L. Harvey and his progeny to prosperity. Naturally, the Harveys have always been anxious to know which crop would next turn the bounty of Lenoir County's land into pay dirt.

These days, Felix Harvey is betting it will be the $150 million-plus air-cargo complex planned for the county. Former Gov. Jim Martin, its prime supporter, projects a $12.9 billion impact on the state by 2010 and as great an impact on the surrounding area as Research Triangle Park has had on the Triangle. Harvey, who has turned the family business over to his son-in-law, John O. McNairy, and dedicated himself to raising $30 million in seed money for the project, predicts it will make Lenoir County a manufacturing and transportation center for the entire Southeast.

But a fair number of farmers don't share Harvey's vision. They fear their land -- their birthright -- will be taken for a project that will never amount to a hill of beans. And they fear higher property taxes on their remaining holdings to subsidize a failed project. To them it is a suspicious-looking package touted by an outfit that once was essentially the company store for their grandfathers. Indeed, Felix Harvey's dream of a new kind of prosperity for his county and region is leading both him and the region down a path away from the farmers whose trade has enriched his family for so many years.

Says J.P. Hill, who raises hogs and tobacco on a 250-year-old family farm a furrow's width from where the runway would lie, "|Felix Harvey~'s always been real nice to me. I trade with them -- and I own a John Deere tractor -- but I don't trust them."

"I saw Mr. Harvey at one of his businesses," says Ben Scarborough, who farms 700 acres around Kinston and Goldsboro. "He said, 'Ben, it's not going to be as bad as you think.' I said, 'Mr. Harvey, you have many poker chips to play in this game. You may give up one to get many. I have only one chip.'"

But for Harvey, at 72, the air-cargo complex is probably the last big bid in a life filled with taking risks and betting on change.

Harvey sold his first produce 62 years ago after painting his little red wagon green and loading it from his grandmother's garden. His father, Felix Harvey Jr., died a year later, at 38. An uncle, Leo Harvey, took over as president of the business and was a father figure to young Felix. A comfortable upbringing sent Felix III to Woodberry Forest School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a bachelor's degree in commerce in 1943.

Harvey -- Jeep to his college buddies -- went into business, picking up and delivering laundry. But he says he was...